Hostel

The latest trend in horror seems to be getting away from the cheap scares and more into the extreme gore type. I have heard a lot about Hostel being very gory and trying to bring myself to watch more horror movies, I obligated.

Hostel is about 3 traveling backpackers that were told of a hostel in Europe where there were plenty of good looking ladies and happen to be attracted to American men. Once they arrive, it doesn’t take too long to find out that this magical place is actually hiding a twisted sequence of events. It becomes their worst nightmare.

Hostel starts off fairly slow and I know you need time to build characters and a plot to set up the fear but I think 40 minutes was too long. Instead, it is filled with soft-core porn which was their attempt to hold you’re interested for the first half of the film. Although, once the gore does come, it continues throughout the rest of the film. The dialog, as a whole, was pretty weak.

Overall, I didn’t feel Hostel was a very good horror film; it’s a gore film with a simple plot. It does, however, do a couple things right. First, it does contain unknown actors. For me this is important to the believability of a horror film. It’s hard enough to create realism but having an A-list actor for the main role would leave me thinking, “but he was just in a movie playing an inspiring baseball player!” Second, it did contain some storyline originally. The fact that there would be rich people doing these awful things is actually quite freighting and sick.

Since when does the good guy win in horror movies? I mean props for doing something a little different with the ending but there was almost too much closure for a horror movie. Or maybe I am just trained to feel this way because of all the other horror films that have brainwashed us. Still, the ending was a little less than satisfying.